MJQ Irish Cultural Centre

About MJQ Irish Cultural Centre

The Michael J. Quill Irish Cultural & Sports Centre in East Durham, NY preserves and promotes Irish and Irish-American heritage through music, dance, language, theater, and Gaelic sports. It hosts Catskills Irish Arts Week, the East Durham Feis, the East Durham Irish Festival, GAA competitions, and a full calendar of concerts and rentals.

Media Pillars has managed the Centre's website for years, working directly with the board and volunteers who run the events. It is one of the longest-standing relationships in our portfolio.

Industry: Nonprofit cultural centre, festivals and live events  ·  Location: East Durham, NY — Greene County, Northern Catskills  ·  Website: mjqirishcentre.com

The Challenge

A festival venue lives or dies on event weekends. Ticket sales, reserved seating, performer schedules, and registration all have to work under real load, with volunteers, not developers, running the show.

The site needed to sell tickets with seat selection through Square, publish complex multi-day schedules quickly, and support fundraising, while staying stable through plugin conflicts, security tooling, and last-minute changes before live events.

What Media Pillars Built & Manages

Media Pillars serves as the Centre's outsourced web and events-technology team.

Event Ticketing & Reserved Seating

Integrated The Events Calendar, Event Tickets Plus, and a seating-chart add-on with Square payments, including ticket scanning at the door and consolidation of a legacy ticketing plugin.

Live-Event Troubleshooting & Stability

Diagnosed a firewall conflict that was blocking ticket purchases, resolved a payment webhook storm during a live event, and repaired ticket data at the database level ahead of a sold-out show.

Festival, Feis & Arts Week Pages

Built the East Durham Feis pages and syllabus, the Catskills Irish Arts Week events and performer-schedule pages, and the CIAW registration flow, each designed for fast updates every season.

Buy-a-Brick Fundraising Campaign

Redesigned the Buy a Brick landing page as a fully responsive campaign page with video and campaign graphics, and led the campaign content plan including weekly social video concepts.

Ongoing Website Care

WordPress and Avada maintenance, plugin and payment-integration updates, vendor-support escalation, and mobile bug fixes as the site evolves.

Search & Discovery

On-page SEO so the Centre's festivals, Feis, and Arts Week are found by families, dancers, and musicians planning their trip to the Catskills.

The Outcome

• Reserved-seat ticket sales run reliably through the website with Square, with issues resolved before they reach the public.
• Volunteers can publish new events, schedules, and registration pages each season without rebuilding the site.
• The Buy-a-Brick campaign has a professional landing page and content plan supporting the Centre's capital fundraising.
• A single accountable partner for hosting-level, plugin-level, and payment-level problems, escalated to vendors when needed.
• Cultural events in the Northern Catskills are discoverable in search for the people traveling to attend them.

Services Delivered

Every service on this project is something we offer to any nonprofit, venue, or events business:

Website Design & Care Plans Website Rescue & Redesign Local SEO & AI Search Optimization Social Media & Content Marketing Sales Funnels & Landing Pages Marketing Consulting & Strategy

Platform Stack

WordPress · Avada · The Events Calendar & Event Tickets Plus · Square · Rank Math Pro · WP Rocket · GA4